Revising My Thoughts of the Future

Having spent some time digging into the various arguments around IE 8’s plan to address compatibility concerns since my first post on the subject, I’ve shifted away from my initial embrace of the plan. While I’m not as deeply entrenched as many on the Net, I see this as a major problem. Microsoft will implement this change no matter what, and many developers will make use of it. It may start with bits and pieces – a quick fix to address one incompatibility, but in time we’ll see it crop up in corporate-wide, multi-site environments – like your bank. In time this will drag down the Web as innovation won’t be as important without the looming threat of browser changes. If a corporation can stick with an IE 6 Web application design for five years, they will – it could make a lot of sense economically, but I think it will hamper the interesting changes to user experience and usability practices that come with the new technologies inherit with spec and browser updates. This concept isn’t too well formed in my head yet, so I’ll have to post more later, but until then, I recommend reading the quotes from folks who have thought about the issue far more than I have, and provide much more articulate responses this post: Opera, Mozilla and Safari react to IE’s solution for browser compatibility issues